2026-09-10 · Florida · Courts

What happened. Florida's Third District Court of Appeal held that where a condominium declaration requires unanimity both to terminate the condominium and to amend any provision altering unit owners' “voting rights,” an amendment dropping the termination threshold from 100 percent to the statutory 80 percent floor is itself an amendment to voting rights — and so needs unanimous approval it will never get.

Avila v. Biscayne 21 Condominium, Inc., No. 3D23-1616, was filed on 10 July 2025 on motion for rehearing (Bokor, J., with Fernandez and Lobree, JJ.), on appeal from the Miami-Dade Circuit Court. The court reversed and remanded for entry of a temporary injunction, and certified a question of great public importance.¹

A correction on the date and posture

This decision is frequently dated 2024. It is not. The panel denied rehearing but issued a substituted opinion on 10 July 2025, which mooted a pending motion for en banc review. The operative opinion is the July 2025 one.

The reasoning

The developer's argument was that a termination threshold is not a “voting right” in the sense the declaration protects. The court's answer was textual and short:

“But it is ‘voting rights,’ not ‘right to vote.’ And context matters.”

And on what the original threshold actually conferred:

“By requiring a unanimous vote for termination, the declaration originally gave every unit owner an effective veto over any termination plan, which would be lost if the amendments at issue here were enforced.”

The court relied on Tropicana Condominium Association v. Tropical Condominium, LLC, 208 So. 3d 755 (Fla. 3d DCA 2016), and expressly declined to weigh the policy arguments: “There may be good policy reasons to allow a lower threshold for termination… But we do not set policy.”

The certified question

The court certified this question to the Florida Supreme Court:

“MAY AN AMENDMENT ALTERING THE VOTING THRESHOLD REQUIRED TO TERMINATE A CONDOMINIUM PASS WITHOUT UNANIMOUS APPROVAL WHERE A CONDOMINIUM DECLARATION BOTH: (1) REQUIRES THE UNANIMOUS APPROVAL OF THE UNIT OWNERS BEFORE EITHER TERMINATING THE CONDOMINIUM OR PASSING ANY AMENDMENT TO THE DECLARATION OF CONDOMINIUM ALTERING A UNIT OWNER'S ‘VOTING RIGHTS’ AND (2) LACKS LANGUAGE PURSUANT TO KAUFMAN V. SHERE, 347 SO. 2D 627 (FLA. 3D DCA 1977), AUTOMATICALLY INCORPORATING RELEVANT STATUTORY CHANGES INTO SUCH CONTRACTUAL PROVISIONS?”

The Florida Supreme Court declined to exercise jurisdiction in case SC2025-1169 on 14 October 2025. One sourcing caveat: the official docket document returns an access error, and we were not able to open the order directly. The denial is corroborated by the court's own indexed record and by multiple firm alerts, but we flag it as not personally verified.

1. Avila v. Biscayne 21 Condominium, Inc., No. 3D23-1616 (Fla. 3d DCA 10 July 2025) — substituted opinion on rehearing ↩
2. Florida Trend, “Two Roads Diverged” — reporting on the Biscayne 21 acquisition and litigation, April 2026 ↩
3. Bilzin Sumberg, Emerging Pressure Points — describing a drafting effort on s. 718.117(2), May 2026 ↩